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Sunday, 7 March 2010

I talk a lot here about climate science, but I have a growing realisation that the vast majority of those who get exercised about this issue don’t know enough science to read papers in academic journals, and certainly are not excited about the issues that really attract scientific controversy, like string theory (someone has gone so far as to write a book about that with the stinging title, Not Even Wrong).

The real issue is fear that a fundamental change in the energy economy will cause a massive collapse in living standards. This fear is justified, but if mainstream climate science is right, we will need to make that change sooner or later, and the longer we delay, the harder it will be to get this change right without economic chaos. This fear is leading to a campaign that is not attacking the science as much as the scientists, which is why I set up a pro-science petition.

In response to my petition, Tim Curtin sent me a list of questions, which I repeat here with his permission:

You say: (1) "Stealing emails...", You have no evidence any were stolen, either they were up for grabs on ftp, or an insider blew the whistle.

(2) "magnifying the significance of errors" - actually the errors are beyond magnification, eg tippexing Roman glory days and the MWP

(3) "and invoking conspiracy theory" - the emails are very strong evidence of a well-organised conspiracy to pervert the progress of science

(4) " is no substitute for reasoned evidence-based debate" - a non sequitur. Actually Jones and his CRU abetted by Mann & Co took every possible means to suppress evidence-based debate (e.g. by preventing access to the evidence)...

(5) "Yet in the field of climate science...no one has presented a credible alternative theory, the usual approach to overturning a scientific theory". Actually there is overwhelming evidence from multivariate regressions that radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere has no statistically significant impact on changes in mean max or min temperatures anywhere on earth once changes in surface solar radiation are taken into account. Watch this space, as not a single climate journal (eg Nature, Science, PNAS, JoC etc etc) will ever publish any paper on this, given that all their boards are controlled by friends of Jones et al (eg Schellenhuber, Rahmstorf, Schneider, Schmidt, Hansen, et al ad infinitum).

Let’s take this from the top.

An archive of emails from an institution appears on the Internet in various places. The authors of the emails have not given their permission for their private emails to be published. By any reasonable definition, that’s theft. It doesn’t matter who did it or how, or whether someone left the front door open. The police are investigating. The police generally only investigate crimes.

The “Roman glory days and the MWP”: The most obvious response is that human society is vastly different today, with huge cities and vast impoverished agricultural societies a few metres above sea level. In Roman or Medieval times, if the local climate became unsuited to human society, people could and did migrate. We don’t have that option today.

I’ve studied a number of temperature reconstructions. The further back you go, the bigger the uncertainties. I had a look at the papers flagged as containing the most reliable data on the medieval warm period on a contrarian web site (CO2 science) that collects material on this stuff. The earliest and latest peak were 600 years apart. While it is quite likely that the odd spot around the world was much warmer than it is today at some point in the past, that does not mean the global average was much higher. An increase in the global average is important because it has consequences like sea level rise, and pushing habitats uphill and away from the equator. If it was warmer during the MWP or Roman period than it is now, there would be evidence that sea level was higher at that time (at least very similar) whereas the only evidence I’ve seen (admittedly with very big error bars – but current sea level is outside those error bars) shows current sea level as the highest in 3,000 years.

Next: “emails are very strong evidence of a well-organised conspiracy”. I don’t agree. All we see is comment about how poor some other people’s work is (common backroom banter in science) and some conversations that are open to sinister interpretation but checking in the real world shows such sinister intent didn’t materialise. For example: talk of keeping certain work out of the IPCC did not lead to that work being excluded (it is in fact cited). Similarly for the “hide the decline” comment: it refers to the fact that tree ring reconstructions fail to match temperatures in the later half of the twentieth century, a problem Mike Mann describes in a paper in Nature – hardly concealment. This inconsistency between tree ring records and thermometer readings would be a problem for credibility of tree ring reconstructions if they were not cross-checked against many other measures. I don’t see the big conspiracy. I see scientists not watching every word in emails between colleagues. If that is a sinister conspiracy, you have a vivid imagination.

Then: “Mann & Co took every possible means to suppress evidence-based debate”. I agree they could have made a bigger effort to make everything public (e.g., CRU’s computer code) but this claim is an exaggeration. The data they did not make public is data that is not theirs to make public. The remedy for anyone wanting it is to go to the original source. In science, while maximum openness is useful and I fully support the concept, the best check on integrity of results is if they are independently reproduced from scratch, ideally with independently derived data. NASA provides full data sets and software for download. If I download everything and run the software exactly as NASA did in one of their papers, all I am doing is replicating their exact steps including their errors. Anyone who thinks the CRU temperature reconstruction flawed is welcome to start from scratch from publicly available data sources and show that they get an inconsistent result. This is how science normally proceeds. An astronomer reports a new star. Other astronomers use their own telescope to verify the find. They don’t demand a computer dump of the data generated from the original telescope.

Finally: “overwhelming evidence from multivariate regressions”: let’s see that evidence. You don’t have to publish in Nature to get your work out. There are many journals out there, and there is no evidence that those with a strong anti-AGW agenda cannot publish. Certainly, the likes of Richard Lindzen are able to publish, and what strikes me about the contrarian papers I’ve seen is that they are usually rather easy to debunk (even to the point of attracting a rebuttal in one case from a contrarian site). Are you suggesting there’s a bias where only the rubbish contrarian papers are published, and the good ones are not? That is implausible: it’s easy to publish a good paper (sound methodology, original results, defensible conclusions) as long as you are not fussy about where it’s published (a good journal, not necessarily top tier).Thanks for sending me the questions. I am happy to have discussion on this site. I do not snip comments, and only delete spam (but to cut spam, response to older articles are screened). I have absolutely no objection to attacking the science with better evidence, better theories, or both. This is how any scientist works. Attacking the scientists, not the science, is not constructive – hence my petition.

It further worries me that a large part of the lobby against climate science is attempting to reduce science to a matter of opinion. It is not. If a theory fits the evidence, it’s good. If it doesn’t, we need a better theory. If a new theory fits the evidence better, it replaces the old one. This methodology may be strange to those schooled in the arts or social sciences, but it’s a damn good one, and has taken us out of superstition to a worldwide technological society. Let’s not throw it away just because we are faced with a really hard problem if we accept the mainstream theory: the biggest change in the energy economy in over 100 years.

Addendum

To illustrate that the basics are really quite old, it's interesting to read this 1956 paper in American Scienist by Glilbert Plass (reprinted January-February 2010). Much of the detail has since been clarified and some of his errors fortuitously cancelled out so there has been real progress in the science since 1956 – as you would expect.

20 comments:

Here are my preliminary responses to Philip Machanick’s responses to my queries (in two or three parts to beat word limits):

1. Actually Phil should know there is no such thing as “private” emails when sent by employees of one institution to another from/to respective work stations, and least of all when as between e.g. CRU and Penn State the institutions are funded by taxpayers, who have a right under FOI to know what they are paying for. CRU always refused to release anything. 2. Phil, do read more history! The “local society” from c.200 BC to c400 AD did Actually there is no such thing as “private” emails when sent by employees of one institution to another, and least of all when as between e.g. CRU and Penn State the institutions are funded by taxpayers, who have a right under FOI to know what they are paying for. CRU always refused to release anything. very well from a benign climate with high crop yields, likewise during the MWP. Humanity has always done worse in cold times than in warm.Actually there is no such thing as “private” emails when sent by employees of one institution to another, and least of all when as between e.g. CRU and Penn State the institutions are funded by taxpayers, who have a right under FOI to know what they are paying for. CRU always refused to release anything.

3. Phil, where’s your evidence? The equator is not short of people in Africa or South America. Ever been to PNG? – the sea level has been much higher in East Sepik and Ramu quite recently than now, my wife has researched middens full of seashells far (>80 km)inland from today’s coast. Cape York & PNG used to be joined not that long ago, etc.

4. Phil said there was no conspiracy at CRU & Penn. Not even when getting your mates who were lead IPCC authors to change the IPCC definition of peer review? Using that same network to get disagreable editors fired? And to use mateship with IPCC lead authors to allow Santer et al into AR 4 before publication pace IPCC rules?

5. I had said “Mann & Co took every possible means to suppress evidence-based debate”. Phil agrees “they could have made a bigger effort to make everything public (e.g., CRU’s computer code) but this claim is an exaggeration” but goes on “The data they did not make public is data that is not theirs to make public”. That is not true, and, dear Phil, is a serious misrepresentation by you. For example, Sweden and Canada make their own weather data freely available. What CRU refused to publish was its “homogenised, value added” data using Canadian Swedish and other RAW data. Canada and Sweden had no objection to CRU using their data as CRU saw fit, but did object to CRU claiming its homogenised, value added, “Product”, to use Phil Jones’ term, was somehow attributable to Canada Sweden et al. I myself use raw data from NOAA and Australia’s BoM, and so long as I cite my sources they do not object to whatever regressions I choose to run using their data. I am NOT entitled to infer that the NOAA and BoM are somehow responsible for my regressions and will not allow me to publish them.

6. Finally I had mentioned “overwhelming evidence from multivariate regressions”: Phil responds “let’s see that evidence. You don’t have to publish in Nature to get your work out. There are many journals out there, and there is no evidence that those with a strong anti-AGW agenda cannot publish” Well check out Ross McKitrick’s experience, see his website for his comment just last week that he dare not publish the name of the journal his next paper is due to appear in because people like Jones, Mann, Schneider, Holdren, and Wigley will find a way to stop it….Phil again: “it’s easy to publish a good paper (sound methodology, original results, defensible conclusions) as long as you are not fussy about where it’s published (a good journal, not necessarily top tier).” Such as Harry Clark’s Economic Papers? he rejected my critique of the Garnaut review, and another senior personage successfully quashed its appearance elsewhere, luckily Quadrant was less craven (January-February 2009) – but of course has less academic street cred. And brownie points!

Tim, I suspect you have more time on your hands than I do, so you should really look for alternative explanations and corrections yourself rather than have me do that for you, e.g. on the Swedish data accusation.

Your understanding of FOI is batty. You can't work in a goldfish bowl, hence the tempering of the right of the public to access information by a process designed to subject that right to limiting harassment and excessive demands (like over 100 FOI requests for the same data).

The primary responsibility of scientists working on the public purse is to do their jobs, which is producing good science, not answering every lobbyist with an agenda who attempts to waste their time by flooding them with FOI requests.

On CRU and data in general: you can easily check that their results are consistent with measurement by using NASA's data without the Arctic stations. There is more than enough freely available data out there to check if their results are consistent with reality. By not being as open as they should have been (remembering that they started out in an era before massive data repositories were cheap and using the Internet became common), rather than retard science, they have made themselves a target for malicious attack.

Do you have a link to your Quadrant paper, or is it only available by paid subscription? Or FOI request? :)

This is, I suspect, the same Tim Curtin who thinks that for CO2 to increase some other gas has to decrease by the same amount, because it’s “parts per million” — he’s never retracted that claim; this would be another opportunity, though, if it's the same guy, or to say he's not the same guy, whichever.

Apologies if this gets duplicated, no sign my first Submit got through.

I am sorry my #2 response got garbled in the pasting.

Hank Roberts, I await your explanation of how if CO2 increases from 280 ppm to 390 ppm given an intial million parts, the non-CO2 components do not fall from 999720 ppm to 999610 ppm. Of course if THE atmosphere expands from n batches of one million parts to m batches of 1,000,110 parts each, then the % of CO2 arising from an extra 110 ppm of CO2 will be less than that from a shift within the distribution per ppm. But anyway, what is your point other than your usual display of how frightfully clever you are?

Phil: you have misinformed yourself. CRU attempted to fob off requests for actual raw data per country with their matching "homogenised, value added products" by claiming they could not release their raw data sets. E.g. with Sweden, the issue is not the availability of the whole body of Swedish raw data available from Stockholm but those specific sites used by CRU that were no doubt cherry picked and then "homogenised" to produce a pre-determined outcome.

Tim, atmospheric concentrations are in ppm by volume. If you have (for example) a million litres of air and you add 1 litre of a gas without changing the volume, you would increase that gas by 1ppm without changing the concentration of anything else; the pressure in the container would of course increase slightly. For your assertion to be correct, atmospheric concentrations would have to be on the basis of some other measure (e.g. fraction of molecules per mole).

I haven't seen any calculations on the effect on the volume of the atmosphere of adding a few tens of even hundreds of parts per million of a gas, but it would have to be small (as the mass of the atmosphere increases, so does gravitational attracting, countering the increase in pressure) so to a good approximation, adding CO_2 to the atmosphere is not going to do much to the concentration by volume of the other gases. It certainly is not a simple matter of subtracting the increase from the rest.

Phil: you and people like Hank are certainly adept at changing the rules of arithmetic. You said if we have (for example) a million litres of air and we add 1 litre of a gas "without changing the volume" (how do you manage that?), we "would increase that gas by 1ppm without changing the concentration of anything else". What nonsense! But have it your way, as that means the concept of a rising CO2 in the atmosphere, from 280 ppm to 390 ppm, has not in fact changed the concentration! Do tell the IPCC, and Hansen, for reducing CO2 to 350 ppm as he demands will not change the concentration! So why do we have to do it?

Anyway do this: take a litre of water, and add whatever you like, say 200 grams of rice, and see what happens to the level in your measuring jug. Obviously you are no cook! Alternatively look up the meaning of the word "concentration".

Tim, I majored in physics. That doesn't make me an expert but it gives me a basis for understanding the basics, which you clearly don't. The relevant issue is how many GHG molecules a photon is likely to encounter, which is why concentration is measured this way. Note, measured. It is not a derived quantity. If you prefer another way, feel free to rework the physics from scratch. It's no crime not to understand a concept in which you have no expertise but it is a tad silly to attack others for correcting you, and certainly does not advance your case.

MikeH and Phil, you really must write a new textbook on your New Physics. "So adding more of a gas without changing the volume is in fact more likely than not". So increasing CO2 by 110 ppm since 1750 has not changed either the volume or the composition in terms of ppm? O brave new world!

"Water is difficult to compress". Rubbish, it can be done. "When was the last time you bought some compressed water? That is why your measuring jug is a poor analogy". Non sequitur.

"So adding more C02 to the atmosphere does not mean that some other gas has to make way". Tosh, have either of you ever considered what CO2 comprises, if not C and O2? Truly there is nobody more stupid than a physicist if you two are representative. When CO2 is released by burning of fossil fuels, that is the outcome of a reaction between oxygen (yes,ever heard of that? probably not as physicists like you both) and the carbon embedded in the coal, oil, or gas. You are both products of modern science teaching where 90% of physics and chemistry comprises the dreamtime and history of science, clearly you neither ever learnt any physics or chemistry, otherwise you would know that CO2 emissions result from burning carbon with the aid of atmospheric oxygen. But then neither of you ever lit a fire in the bush or anywhere else.

If you had, you would know that the extra CO2 up there (in ppm)is the outcome of using some of the oxygen up there. Therefore extra CO2 in ppm is unavoidably associated with using up some oxygen. Amazing!

Tim, I'm trying to understand your arguments about concentration changes. Are you arguing that there's a fixed number of molecules making up the atmosphere?

Or, since you refer to an "initial million parts," are you thinking that the initial million molecules, measured at time t, must be retained, or perhaps sequestered into the same volume, for measurement at time t + 1?

Ian and MikeH: So like Hank you do not think that adding CO2 to the atmosphere changes its composition in terms of parts per million by volume, repeat after me, BY VOLUME (PPMV?). Thanks for the link to chemistry for kids, perhaps you guys could try arithmetic for kids, like how to work out a per cent (cent = hundred) or a per million as a per cent. I wonder why IPCC prefers per millions to per cents, surely not to make 390 (0.039%) sound a lot bigger than it really is? And where did the CO2 come from? Your chemistry book is silent on that. Perhaps burning fossil fuels uses atmospheric oxygen and produces CO2, in which the C was derived from ancient plants etc that had themselves been produced by atmospheric CO2 and water? So perhaps you are right, there has been no net change in O or CO2 over millennia, and we should stop plotting to reduce what is a non-change in the atmospheric concentration of O and CO2 as measured in ppmv.

Tim, I don't know why being right on the atmosphere content question is so important to you as to invoke the big guns of the Golden Age of Education. I last studied chemistry in 1975 at a place then called University of Natal, Durban in South Africa, and the professors there were quite unsentimental about failing students who produced rubbish answers. Trying to persuade the professor that you were answering a different question than that asked usually didn't help much, especially if you had that answer wrong too. Also, we had to do 2 years of calculus, relevant or not, if we wanted to major in computer science, because it was part of a basic education in science. If you had a better education that that, you would do well to demonstrate that fact by finding flaws in the science, rather than defending your own errors and resorting to ad hominem argument. Then again, if you are capable of channelling Einstein, how can the rest of us compete?

MikeH didn't say water is incompressible. He said, "Water is difficult to compress". There's a nice summary at WikiPedia of compressibility of water, which you can easily verify against the scientific literature. Many fluids are highly incompressible. How do you think hydraulics work?

As for the gas concentration issue, producing CO_2 by combustion of carbon obviously consumes O_2 out of the atmosphere (or whatever other source there may be handy). But you are assuming that all anthropogenic CO_2 arises from combustion of carbon, and the only reaction taking place is C+O_2->CO_2. Fossil fuels are complex cocktails of chemicals. Where do you think the other combustion products go? CO_2 emitted from the chemical process of cement manufacture does not consume atmospheric O_2 (it originates as CaCO_3, usually from limestone rock).

As for your latest assertion that somehow balancing the amount of O_2 and CO_2 fixes the whole problem, perhaps you are unaware that O_2 is not a greenhouse gas? Or are you making some subtle point only accessible to those capable of channelling Einstein?

Tim, if you really want intelligent debate, have the humility to admit error. I'm happy to do so when I make a mistake. It's so much easier than trying to create wriggle room or divert the debate into personal attack. It's not as if this issue has any direct bearing on anything else being discussed here.

Tim, one more thing. In Quadrant, you claim that the IPCC predicts "acceleration of temperature increase with respect to increasing" CO_2. Unfortunately you cite a rather large report (Climate Change 2007. The Physical Science Basis) and this exact text only comes up in searches that reference your article. Could you let me know more precisely where in the IPCC's report this occurs? Presumably not Chapter 7 Couplings Between Changes in the Climate System and Biogeochemistry because you also say in the article that "Aerosols (airborne particles of ash and soot and the like contained in fossil and other hydrocarbon fuel emissions) are unmeasured but surface as a deus ex machina to explain away whatever deviation any model shows from observations of past climate", which you wouldn't have said if you'd read Chapter 7.

TC: I agree this Blog has little to offer when it allows Hank’s recycles. But I will attempt constructive responses to your less sarcastic comments.

1. I have nothing to say nor have ever said anything about compressibility of water and hydraulics.2. I was addressing claims that adding 100 ppmv of CO2 to the atmosphere does not affect the proportion of non-CO2, even when most if not all the anthropogenic component of the CO2 derives from burning of fossil fuels using oxygen. I never said oxygen is a GHG, why do you infer I did?3. You ask for my source for my claim in Quadrant that the IPCC predicts "acceleration of temperature increase with respect to increasing" CO_2. I thought everybody knows that is what the IPCC claims. One ref. is at p.629 (Chapter 8, AR4, WG1), where IPCC doubles the rate of growth of [CO2] which was 0.4% pa from 1958 to 2010, to 1% pa. as a way of projecting faster temperature rise this century – its main trick for this is in the MAGICC model used for its projections in chapter 8 which assumes zero growth in terrestrial and oceanic uptakes (see also pp.604-605). But for specific citations on your point, see the SPM, WG1, p13, top left, where it is stated to be “very likely (>90%) that continued GHG emissions would produce “further warming” larger than observed in the 20th century, and p.12, even if GHGs and aerosols were kept at 2000 levels, there would be warming of 0.1oC per decade, i.e. 1oC for the century as against 0.7oC from 1900 to 2000 according to GISS. By email I am sending you the original paper with all footnotes, the Quadrant version had to be shortened.4. Finally, it would be more pleasant here if you avoided sarcasm and other putdowns of somebody old enough to be your father, I knew of Einstein before your were born, and went to quite a good school, Michaelhouse, down the road (so to speak) from Uni Natal, and then for post-grad to LSE, not a bad outfit in the 1960s, with Popper and Lionel Robbins still around. But I can take it if you want to stick to your style of discourse.